Alan Turing: "The criminal who won the war"?

good afternoon so thank you to all of those that are joining us here at the national museum of computing and good afternoon to you that are on the zoom link so we're here with sidder maturing and we we've been working on kind of theories and myths of alan turing and we need to know the truth now we decided that we'd look at a wide variety of kind of questions that we've gone out to the public to find out what what's a myth what's the truth so i'm gonna say to the guys that are on zoom on the live feed if you have any questions we've asked you to put into the chat and we will try and get through to your questions at the end of this session so derma i have one the first question i'd like to ask you it's come through from a viewer or a follower on twitter and he has said dermot what a privilege alan turing is a massive personal hero whom i voted for the 50-pound note huge highlight when he won my question is did he have any particular parts or bits of wisdom or a quotation which inspired him people quite often want to get hold of alan turing quotes um there's actually an industry at the minute of alan showing quotes if you go to amazon so those of you watching on your computer will now know that go off and do this right now you can type in alan turing inspiring quotes and amazon will then offer you a range of products which you can put in your office or on your desk or in your kitchen or wherever to be inspired by some marvelous thing that alan turing is supposedly uh to have said um i find it very curious that at least half of those quotes are made up okay um and i mean he didn't write very prolifically when he was alive uh he wrote a number of academic papers which these days would have ensured that he got fired from any university where producing several papers a year is absolutely necessary to hold down your job in those days things were a bit more relaxed but he produced a remarkably small number of papers and he produced a remarkably small number of writings which are of interest to the general reader most of his papers are written in mathematics not in english so you know you can't get quotes well for normal people anyway you can't get quotes out of equations so um einstein probably an exception to that one because we the only thing we can quote from einstein is probably an equation but alan turing was not that man so there are a few things so he gave a few radio broadcasts where we got the transcripts and he wrote a couple of popular papers the most famous one being the one where he discusses the question where the machines can think and it leads to that whole test called the imitation game where you shut a computer away in a room and you shut a person away in a room and then the judge has to come and try and figure out which which is the computer and which is the human and that that paper has got some sort of quotable bits in it but it seems to me that it's very odd indeed that the quotes that we associate with alan turing particularly ones which you will find uh on google from 2017 onwards at least 50 of them were never uttered by alan turing so then the question is where have they come from where wherever the quotes come from um the answer is in part that people have taken the script from the imitation game movie and kind of assumed that the scriptwriter was uh quoting you know from the horse's mouth which is you know i mean it takes 10 seconds thought to realize that there's got to be nonsense but half of them can't even be explained away in that way so some of them are genuinely completely and utterly made up and i have no idea where they came from so that wasn't quite what your question was asking though so the question the question was whether alan turing himself was inspired by any quote and i don't think i i think the answer to that is probably no though i think for every single thing that he did throughout the whole of his career he was inspired by first of all the people that he worked with i mean there's this myth of alan turing being this sort of solitary genius who worked in a cupboard all his life and never got out to speak to real people and you know that's just nonsense he was always surrounded by colleagues and sparking ideas off people and having arguments that was i mean that's kind of the way that most clever people work actually so so i don't think he's particularly exceptional in that um but he would take the themes or the ideas that were coming from the conversations he was having and then push them out into some dimension that people hadn't thought of before that's where his real genius was so constantly you can find uh if you're like sort of seed corn in alan turing's history where you can see ah that's very interesting because that idea seems to have blossomed into this and uh so for example i mean let's we're here we are we're at the national museum of computing we should celebrate the origins of computing when alan turing invented computability in 1935 and he invented the concept of a multi-purpose computing machine now people will say well sort of so what but back in 1935 machines only had one purpose so the easiest way to visualize this is if you go into your kitchen and you've probably got a toaster you've probably got a frying pan you've probably got a dishwasher i mean you may not have all of those things but if you do have them then that's great but if you tried to fry an egg in the dishwasher it really wouldn't work if you tried to cook a piece of toast in a dishwasher it certainly wouldn't work if you tried to wash dishes in a toaster that would be a bit of a disaster single purpose machines particularly for doing what you might consider to be computation was where it was at in the 1930s so yes there were adding machines so people would have adding machines on their desks where you could crank a handle and it would and it would do addition for you but that machine would not be capable of being diverted into another purpose so the idea that you could have a universal machine where you fed it different instructions so that it would carry out different tasks was an incredible breakthrough and this whole thing came from a conversation that he was having at the back of a mathematics class at university in cambridge with his professor who subsequently turned out to be a brilliant mathematician came to bletchley park solved the lorenz problem et cetera et cetera i mean you know quite quite an amazing guy in his own right max newman newman said to during he was explaining this idea about the effectually the ground rules for mathematics and whether you could have a sort of like a litmus test to see whether theorems were provable or this is the stuff that gets mathematicians going okay and so is there a litmus test to figure out whether whether theorems are provable or not and so newman was trying to get this concept across his students and said you can think of it this way you can say is there a process a sort of a robotic a mechanical process where you could actually ask could a machine do it to figure out whether proven theorems are provable and sharing takes away this idea that can a machine do it and he comes up with this concept of the computing machine that you could program to do to do different things and it's just it's quite extraordinary and you know we've now got an entire museum here devoted to the fallout from that one thought the answer is no he didn't follow one particular inspirational quote and he certainly didn't write any inspirational quotes a lot of people have written inspirational quotes in his name but what he has done part of his legacy is he has continued to inspire and infuse generations of people that's i think the key message isn't it on that yeah your answer was a lot shorter and perhaps more user-friendly than mine but yes good so i am going to read this one question because i from the same um the same person and the bonus question is what was his favorite pastime other than running um yeah well okay so the newspaper reports of alan turing's death have some rather uh strange things so newspaper sub editors are in a world of their own and they they have a sort of special form of creativity so some of the things that they picked up on were uh did own cooking okay so this is a this is a man who died in 1954 so i guess the idea that a man who did his own cooking was possibly strange but he lived on his own so i'm not sure who else was going to do his cooking but okay so did own cooking i mean that might that probably doesn't count as a favorite pasta um then another one which also picks up the food theme is there's a photograph of um alan turing and then it says underneath it says he fed the brain now you're thinking what what's going on here well of course the manchester computer in 1954 this massive great sort of computing machine um in the style that we celebrate here with the working machinery from that from that era and the manchester computer was called in popular speech it was called the electronic brain so alan turing was the man who fed the break yeah so did did he feed the brain as a pastime i'm not not actually not actually sure that shortly there's a theory there's a story that he um took up uh playing with violin at one point and i anybody who's had small children who learning the violin will know that for everybody else people learning the violin is a sort of intensely unpleasant experience um but so i'm i'm slightly nervous about that um but no the running is the running is the main the main sort of extracurricular thing that he did he liked to go down the pub he'd like to play chess he wasn't particularly brilliant at chess he wasn't lousy um and that got him into sort of a special league when he was at bletchley park because but actually park co-breakers divided into two groups as far as chess was concerned there were the grand master bletchley park was absolutely swarming with chess grandmasters um and then there were the lousy amateurs who couldn't couldn't uh play a game at all and there were one or two people like alan turing who were sort of somewhere in the middle they were no way grandmasters but they were they could beat the amateurs so sort of this tiny very small group of people who were sort of like half competent and so he was he was in that group and he was very keen it was like the holy grail for computer group programming in the early 1950s could you write a program for a computer to play a game of chess and uh so he actually came up with a one of the world's first chess playing algorithms i have no idea whether it was any good and i don't think it exists anymore so um uh would be fascinating to discover that if it did but so chess playing certainly um let me think about other things i mean actually what he really liked doing was just going down the pub and having a good old argument about the future of sort of science and you know technology and that kind of stuff so uh sounds a bit like a bustman's holiday but there we go so i'm going to lead on with that so we we've conducted a very small poll and we wanted to know what what people you know all over the world knew or thought they knew about alan turing and with the percentage out of 100 there was 40 percent of people that believe that alan turing was just a code breaker you've just mentioned a variety of other things mathematic mathematician you know an inventor a scientist in your expertise tell us who you think alan turing really was i'm sorry the 40 of your watchers on zoom and 40 of the people in this room are either going to be deeply upset or they're going to leave because i'm going to tell them all that alan turing was not much of a code breaker he was a mathematician hired by the code breakers to assist them in their work and that meant that yes they sent him on a co-breaking course because he had needed to know what it was that he was getting himself into and certainly the uh influence that he had on the shape of code breaking in britain was massive but it was very short term um so let's just do a mini chronology around this so alan turing is sent on a co-breaking course because he knows nothing about the subject in january 1939 he is then detailed to work on the enigma problem but it's pretty half-hearted and it's part-time until war breaks out he goes gets to bletchley park on the 4th of september 1939 day after britain declares war at that stage he is working day and night on the enigma problem because the polls have come up with this marvelous truckload of information about how the enigma machine works which the british didn't really know anything much about until they gave it to them and also their own code breaking techniques and that enables alan turing together with various others i'll mention in a second to come up with the design for the bomb machine which is the famous machine that finds the settings that the germans are using on their enigma machines every day the amazing thing that you've got the rebuild of here at the national museum of computing that again just to sort of while in passing debunk another code breaking myth about alan turing which is that that machine was his own private creation and cooked up in a garden shed somewhere um it's it's an and then it took many many years of sweated labor to persuade the authorities that this was a sensible thing to do it's all it's it's all bunk it's complete nonsense they knew this was a number one problem and they knew that the problem had to be solved using machinery and they knew what the rough outline of the machinery was going to be because the poles had already done it and they'd given the british the template for how to how to follow that particular path what alan sharing needed to do is to build a much more versatile uh more sort of souped-up version of what the poles had done which would be much more future proof and so that was the task that he was put on he'd created his design by according to documents in the national archives he'd done that by the end of the month by the end of the first month of the war so you're then wondering what alan turing then did from the end of september 1939 right to ve day um we'll come on to that in a second but um he then didn't build the bomb machine because he was a lousy engineer so he hired the pledge park management hired the british tabulating machine company that made early computing machines they made punch card tabulators and that kind of stuff they made pre-war computing machinery these were the people who were there to turn it into engineering reality and then when the prototype finally arrived at blessy park in early 1940s didn't work very well and it took the genius of another mathematician called gordon welshman to basically add a modification to it that made it work effectively um so i haven't got alan trump doing any code breaking yet i've gone doing some engineering design some circuitry design some logic design it's very very clever i don't don't try and disparage his work or his inventiveness but this isn't real code breaking he then did turn his attention to naval enigma which was a much more difficult problem and involved much more of what code breakers would recognize to be code breaking which is figuring out what the system is and then trying to figure out a way of breaking it um and so he did that for a couple years but it wanes by the time you get to 1942 enigma code breaking has become mechanized because his machine works quite well there's plenty of bright minds who are probably more adept at code breaking than he is around to do stuff so they find other things for him to do they send him off site he's not actually at bletchley park after the summer of 1942 he was in america for six months and then when he comes back he said to hanslow park which is like these days uh in uh i'll probably get into trouble for saying this this is it's still a secret government establishment at hansard park and the rumors that you read in the newspapers if they're to be believed then this is where the latter day q division that provides the sort of james bond devices that uh our spies need in foreign parts and they do other stuff as well um so he was sent off there to do basically cyber security work which was interesting so i haven't answered your question yet found sharing wasn't a code breaker what on earth was he so the 60 who didn't think he was a code breaker now you can leave the room because you'll be all very very bored in his lifetime he was celebrated as this pioneer of computer science the person who had been responsible for the design of britain's computer singular because in 1945 the people in power knew that we only needed one i mean what would you use computers for i mean in 1945 it was obvious you used them to calculate the trajectories of missiles and it's complicated i mean if you think that you're you've got an anti-aircraft missile and it's complicated because the aircraft is moving at possibly variable speed the missile's going to sort of follow a particular path and that's affected by wind speed and the density of the air so things like humidity and the spin as it comes out of the barrel and you know muzzle velocity and all those kinds of lots of lots and lots of variables and they're some of them are interdependent so the amount of friction that the missile has on going through the air depends on the speed and so you know you've got complicated feedback equations going on here so very complicated equations so you'd need a computer for that but if you tot up the number of trajectory equations you're going to have to solve in any given month you're probably only need one computer so we only needed one computer now anatomy then spends the next three or four years trying to convince the powers to be that computers are for things other than calculating missile trajectories um he says there's this guy called sir edward travis i can't tell you what he did or does he happens to be now the head of gchq in 1945 he says but if you ask him he might be able to give you a bit of a clue that there are some other things you can get computers to do and then he comes up with another long list of stuff that you can get computers to do so that's what he was famous for in his lifetime but i think he was also famous for having written this paper on that we were talking about earlier on computable numbers and this was in the world of mathematical logic it wasn't really intended to be a paper about computer science at all until suddenly that's what people breathed life into it through that process we've just been talking about but so mathematical logic foundations of computer science foundations of an entire discipline of mathematics which is about computability and we have entire maths departments in universities that study this this subject a little bit of code breaking as an interlude and then we got computer design and then computer programming which was fiendishly difficult in the 1950s um and finally towards the end of his life uh what feels like a bit of a departure and i don't really understand why people aren't switched on by this quite as much as you'd expect but he was looking at how patterns form in plants and animals and he was able to model things like zebra stripes leopard spots there's this weird sort of maze-like patterns that you see on pufferfish that found in the congo river and these patterns can be explained by the equations that he came up with and it's i love this stuff because it's very visual and it's brightly colored and you know you can show pictures of it which is which is cool and then he was also looking at the same kind of problems in plants so um the problem he'd only got halfway through at the end of his life was why um if you look at the um i don't know what you call them the sort of spine things that you find on a fur cone that they're arranged in spirals and some of them go one way around the fur cone and some of them go the other way um sort of left-handed and right-handed directions and you if you count the spirals it's difficult you thought that counting was difficult counting can be really hard particularly when it comes to biology but can count the spirals and you'll find that the ones going one way and the ones going in the opposite way are adjacent numbers in a fibonacci series same thing you take you go down to waitrose at christmas time all marks and spencers or other supermarkets we are not plugging any particular brand here but you will find that they serve these big long they sell these big long stalks which got sprouts on them they haven't chopped the sprouts off and put them in a plastic bag they're just still stuck to the stalk again the sprouts are arranged around the stalk in spirals and again it's the same thing there's a different number of spikes some of the spirals go to the left and some of them go to the right and you'll find if you count the spirals they're a bit easier to do with sprouts and fur coatings actually but again it's adjacent numbers in of the fibonacci series same thing with sunflowers you can count enough the sunflower seeds in the sunflower head are arranged in a spiral pattern sometimes the left side goes to the right adjacent numbers in the fibonacci series and he was trying to make his theory of pattern formation explain pattern formation in like that in plants in the same way that he'd been able to explain it in in animals so is this guy a co-breaker i don't think so i think i think he's just a wizzy biologist we can now 100 say that if you think that alan turing was just a co-breaker you are very very wrong i wouldn't want to take that away because i think i've come back to what i said earlier that he had he had this astonishing influence on code breaking and one thing i didn't mention was that as a mathematician informing the shape of co-breaking in the 1940s he forced the mathematicians to confront something that they had been denying for a while which was that their approach to probability and statistics was too dogmatic and they've been ignoring this theory which we now use all the time and in the middle of a pandemic we're using it to try and explain what might happen in the future we're using bayesian statistics the probability that such and such is the case given that something else that we know is or might be the case and and that that was very it was it was almost heretical to think about statistics in that way in the 1930s because professor fisher at cambridge university said that he wasn't going to allow anybody to practice in his university if they believed in such nonsense and i mean and so alan sharing actually basically forced the statisticians at bletchley park to think about probability in this bayesian way instead of the old-fashioned way and that meant that they could make much better predictions about i mean just sort of everyday things like well every day for cobra because things like which rotor are the germans using in the right hand position in the enigma machine today we don't have any data on that but we can probably predict it using these kinds of statistical techniques which are considered to be i don't know some violation of statistical religion which was i mean it was it was really really interesting so he was like he stamped that on on the on on the co-breaker so we mustn't write him out the code breaking story i don't seek to do that but but there was so much more and actually a lot of us or most people on the planet are actually benefiting from the things that he started established and created or were inspired by so i think yeah i'm gonna this is a short answer okay on another poll we asked um representatives anyone sort of following or anyone's got an interest in alan turing give us you know one sentence one word that you think is part of alan turing's legacy and i have to say there was a huge percentage percentage and accessibility came into it now these were very one-worded um but i found that it really hit home to me because actually i do think that he is a you know he was a fantastic advocate of what we're trying to do now we are behind the times in regards to being accessible when it comes to computing and technology whether it's girls you know um boys you know neurodiverse communities um i know that you have a passion for you know getting the younger generations into this but do you i want you to elaborate on the fact that i'm saying accessibility but you can explain that better i think of his legacy of what we're doing or what we can or should be doing okay so what i am perhaps uh i think is a sort of 20th century view of alan turing is the look of hit look at him as a historical figure who did all these amazing things and that's not wrong i mean i don't don't don't don't sort of seek to tear that what tear that up and throw it away but there's a reason that he's on the 50-pound note and the reason he's on the 50-pound note is not purely as a historical figure of interest i think he's on the 50-pound note because the bank of england and the committee of folks that selected alan sharing from a wide field of very brilliant stars frankly they're trying to convey a message which is about the future and yes all right to pick a character who in his lifetime was finding he couldn't get his papers published because they accused him of writing science fiction um that's a cool guy to pick to be an inspirational figure for the future and i think you're absolutely right they've picked him because in part he's a figure that represents diversity and okay we know that there's this story about him being um you know prosecuted because he was gay and uh of being therefore a victim of sort of the purge against gay men in the early 1950s that's not how he would want ever have wanted to be remembered but i think what we can do is sort of convert that because anatomy has become some sort of icon anyway he he he can stand for a bunch of ideas and if you like an agenda of things that we ought to do and yes it's got to be connected with who he was and what he did and what he stood for in his own lifetime otherwise it's totally artificial but certainly during his lifetime he was uh i think an enthusiast for uh promoting how exciting and interesting mathematics and science could be i mean when he was a kid so he's like 17 okay in his boarding house at school there's this extraordinary building with this um for a school building it is extraordinary there's a sort of quite elegant um iron staircase that go wraps itself around four corners of the sort of um stairwell and the center of it is hollow so the stairs actually just sort of stick out from the walls well there's a safety rail but um but it means that you've got this sort of hollow square in the middle and it's a three-story building so you can pin something to the ceiling at the top and it will hang all the way down to the bottom so alan turing hung a pendulum all the way down and you start this thing swinging and it's a and this was a foucault's pendulum and as it swings provided you've fixed it with a point at the top um as it swings it will go round in us the ang the uh what is it the plane in which the pendulum swings will rotate reflecting the rotation of the earth and you can tell whether you're in the northern or hemisphere northern or southern hemisphere from which direction it goes around and this is like kind of cool stuff this is somebody who's 17 who's just doing this and the other kids at school are thinking whoa what's going on here you know i mean and this is it it's all part of his sort of willingness to infuse people in in the stuff that he finds really sort of sexy and exciting um and so i think that yes therefore we should you use his example to inspire people to find that sort of spark of interest in areas where frankly we our own school report as a society should be marked needs to do a lot better let me give you some examples i only learned this this year but we have as a society known it for over 10 years that of the people coming up for higher education or careers in computer science only 16 percent are women what's happened to the other women who wanted to do computer science society and i don't blame schools incidentally i really don't blame schools because i taught school teachers about this problem all the time and they are as dismayed by as i am so it's something that's happening in society where somebody is saying to young girls quite early in their lives that these are boys subjects or they're too difficult or that they because they're a creative person and they should go off and do something else and that's just it's just nonsense we're depriving ourselves of really talented computer scientists because we're being genderized about it let me give you another example and this one really annoys me and i know it's not right to put all black and ethnic minority people into the same bucket so i'll pull out of that bucket one particular subgroup which is kids who self-identify as being black caribbean for their ethnicity those kids don't present for stem subjects at a level disproportionately they are somehow pushed off into other things i'm not saying they don't do a levels i'm just saying then the disproportionately not put forward for science and technology and mathematics at a level again that society that's doing that somebody has said to them at some point on the way oh but chemistry is a difficult subject and you might find it a bit of an easier win to do something else these kids you know who might be brilliant chemists and they might be really excited by the subject of somehow being put off and you know we've got to fight against that we've got to stop talking about it and actually start doing something about it very good i knew you were passionate about that one so i'm going to ask we've talked about some of his achievements and i think that could take years to really talk and actually i think as we're evolving within technology science you know um mathematics his achievements are constantly evolving because you know he he started these sort of these these these things and we're evolving on his concepts and his theories so actually you know it forever more he's going to be in existence and hopefully we continue to to grow that um we briefly touched on the 50-pound note in brief tell me why you really think that he's on the 50-pound note your opinion yeah um well i've talked to the folks at the bank of england about their selection process which i think is about as fair as you could ask for um they asked the public to nominate people they said 50 pounds got to have a scientist on it because we cover other areas of life on the other denominations and we also want to find a character who can represent diversity and if you look at the shortlist it was really eye-wateringly difficult for them to to make make their decision i think to be give you the honest answer to your question i am sure that the fact that alan turing was nominated by bbc2 viewers as the nation's icon of the 20th century i think that would have had a powerful impact i think the imitation game movie would have had a powerful impact drawing the attention of the public to this obscure person that they wouldn't have heard of before and that's all partly driven i think by his own tragic life story so you've got you've got somebody who was a super achiever and we're sort of fond of in terms of the sort of the nation's heart but i think it's also the heart strings are sort of twanged a little bit by that by that sort of personal tragedy and i think that's you put all those things together in the mix and i think that's the reason why why they picked him can i you ask me to be brief but can i just add one footnote to that which is about this thing about being an icon i'm going to find this whole thing very strange and we began with fake quotes but i think one of the sort of side effects of the disease called being an icon is that you get all kinds of mythology and weirdness is sort of like poured into the vessel that is called the icon that was alan turing and what's in that vessel is no longer the person that was alive between 1912 and 1954 it's some product of our own modern imagination and it's i mean that in itself is fascinating that whole sort of process of turning somebody into something that they weren't i mean that's very very interesting to me but um i think we when we're thinking about alan showing i think we need to constantly remind ourselves are we talking about alan sharing the icon or are we talking about alan showing the person and you know i'm not saying that it's wrong to think of him as an icon um i'm not very keen on sort of these kinds of judgments anyway but but what's what are we trying to get out of it and and if we can get away from this sort of slightly sentimental notion of him as being this sort of code breaker who won the war for us and this victim of state persecution both of which are pieces of mythology then that would be that would be really good so you touched on this imitation game we asked the question do people think that it was factually correct do they think it's terribly incorrect um and the main or would you like to know more or are they unsure we've all seen i've personally seen a very large document with what is stated as inaccuracies on the story um i'm being polite it was handed to me and actually i did actually enjoy the read because that's watching the film you know you you there is an icon alan turing oh my god he's in the movie that's great this is you know um can you just tell us just what what well i'll be very interested to know how many people thought it was accurate because 20 of the poll said that they thought that it was as accurate as possible 80 percent were it was very much sold for hollywood well it was well of course it's hot of course it's hollywood and i suspect that any biopic that comes out of hollywood is going to have to be remolded to tell a good story and to sell plenty of cinema tickets and that's that's their job and did they do a good job yeah i think they did a cracking job actually and anybody who's grumpy about the movie is probably forgotten that they're going to the movies which are designed to entertain you and they should probably have watched the documentary on the history channel you know i mean and and you know there's horses for courses here so hollywood shouldn't be blamed for producing i think a really good movie um delighted they produced a good movie and i'll tell you one of the other great things about that movie quite apart from the fact that it's put alan turing on the map in a way that he probably wasn't before it's actually prompted a load of people who didn't really know anything or anything significant about it to find out about things like world war ii code breaking or the history of early computers and so that's been that's been a you know a great boost to those of us who are in the sort of world of you know computing heritage so it's a it's a it's a it's a nice it's a nice sort of spin-off for us but does it matter that it's inaccurate i don't think it does provided that people remind themselves that they were watching a movie but to come back to the point about icons i think that's really hard to ask people to do that if the first encounter that you come across with somebody like winston churchill was in the movies you will think of winston churchill's habits as being as played by the actor that you saw and you will think of winston churchill's utterances as being the things that you heard in that movie and yeah there's probably enough movies about winston churchill for after a while that to become moderated and sort of just changed and certainly is probably a bit closer to what he was like in real life without ensuring that's not going to happen and so alan sharing has now become the character that was written in that script which is not alan turing i mean this this is victimization victimhood narrative that runs from the very first scene right through to the end of the movie and it's all i mean it's a it's a dramatic construct there's no factual basis for it so we have to just sort of remind ourselves constantly remind ourselves that the movie is not the biography if you want the biography go read the biography i have to just wait one point on this though so we want to inspire future generations and we really especially here at the museum want to ensure that you know the next generation or those that want to learn get the factual information but alan shuring maybe wasn't as well recognized or acknowledged for being a computer scientist and all those other things until they watched the film so they watched the film and then that's what they believe is is is true so it's very hard good because you know but does it matter i mean so i mean to be honest i think it probably it probably doesn't matter unless people are trying to uh make some kind of sentimental point about alan turing's own life which is based on the movie i mean i'm delighted that people should take the movie and be inspired by it and want to you know you use that as a springboard for doing doing something you know whether it be to come here and see the bomb machine you know in in operation or whether it's to go off and uh convince the world that we need more than one computer um that's that uh um you know that that that's that's a that's a that's a cracking thing um when it gets to uh i mean i suppose i suppose that what i'm really telling you is that lots of people ask me questions which tends to use the imitation game narrative as their starting point like how do you feel about alan showing's terrible mental illness towards the end of his life i was saying well there is no evidence that he was mentally ill towards the end of his life so i'm not sure how i can have feelings about it you know um so but i guess other people don't get asked questions like that so it doesn't really matter too much so yes let's stick to the positive and the inspiration and the uh and the uh and perhaps sort of not worry too much about what sort of being an icon actually means and the achievements the achievements are really important because the achievements i think are the source of the inspiration yeah um would would you say that in hindsight do you think that alan turing was a free spirit and was allowed to uh being in black to park you were here to do a job so as you say he went on to the training courses um you know and he did what he needed to do he did that very quickly moved on to the next thing do you think that that there may have been bigger and better things to come from him if he hadn't have started here oh that's a very interesting thought um i think that being at bletchley park put him in contact with a group of people who probably wouldn't have come across in his field of mathematical logic where he was active before the war began so i mean ranging from uh i'll give you just two examples out of many characters that he met at bletchley park um but uh one person that and those of you who've watched the imitation game will know this well that he met and got very fond of this very brilliant cambridge mathematician called joan clark and they were briefly engaged to be married for a time and i think that this widened his world because historically he'd been in basically all male institutions all his life right up to sort of the age of you know 28 or whatever he was when he came came to bletchley park um and i think to discover that women were not some kind of fairy creature that perhaps his mother had been to him um and could engage in intellectual battle about problems that fascinated him i think that i think that was that was very important and i think i think it's quite interesting that if you look at his research students at manchester i mean he supervises a remarkably small number of people for higher degrees but his research students he had three at manchester two of whom were women and while this was going on he was engaged in correspondence with one of the research students who was doing her thesis for professor morris wilkes who's very closely associated with this museum that we're in um uh morris's student was called beatrice worsley she was canadian and it's quite interesting because alan turing and beatrice worsley are conducting a transatlantic correspondence about her thesis and it's full of back chat about alan turing's and morris wilkes's mutual antipathy so it's actually it's actually quite amusing so so he's he's having this sort of really quite open irreverent correspondence with this woman student who is not supervising but he's sort of like advising on the periphery of her thesis she's probably incidentally the first person in the world to have got a phd in computer science she just happens to be a woman um you know so i mean i think this is there's lots of sort of sub texts of this particular plot but so i think alan turing's sort of like ability to deal with women on their own terms and as equals i think that probably started here at bletchley the other person i'd like to mention is donald mickey donald mickey became the professor of machine intelligence at edinburgh university and he started out doing something completely different and then he came to bletchley park and was put on the team who were designing and building the colossus machine and solving the the rents problem and although alan turing wasn't working physically at bletchley park he would drop in from time to time because he was on the machine committee and so he'd like to find out what was happening on the colossus project and and so forth and then he'd go off to the pub with donald mickey and they'd discuss this big problem we were talking about earlier which is whether you could program a computer bearing in mind that all they had was a half built colossus so whether you could program a theoretically possible future computer whether you could program a computer to play a game of chess in other words could you design an algorithm how could you actually break down the steps that the computer would need to take into small enough units to constitute a set of instructions for the computer as to what to do when playing gaming chess i do this in the pub over beer i mean okay most people go to the pub to watch the football but these guys they went off to do this um and i think i think that's that's that that's lovely because this means that mickey is inspired by these conversations and by what he's doing here at bletchley park on colossus he changes the direction of his career completely to go off and become what may have been the first professor of professorship of artificial intelligence in the uk and this is all inspired by this sort of whole touring-ism which i think is i mean that's just it's just a lovely story there's a footnote to it which i must if you will permit me and take one minute just permit me in 1940 everybody knew it wasn't a speculation everybody knew for a factual certainty that the germans were going to invade britain it was just a matter of when not whether so they were everybody was doing civil defense and and everybody was terrified about what it was going to be like so alan turing took all his savings out of the bank and converted them into silver bars because he reckoned that once the germans invaded then the banks will all go bankrupt never get your money out so the sensible thing to do is convert it into real assets that you know would retain their value he went out into the countryside with a pram that he borrowed from somebody put the silver ingots in the pram so he didn't have to carry on so heavy and he buried them in a field and uh he made a careful map showing where in the field he you know go to the third oak tree turn left you know measure exactly 90 degrees and now you know how many places there 1945 donald mickey and alan sharing borrow pram go back to the field with alan's homemade metal detector you can feel what's gonna happen now you can you can already see the punch line can't you um uh they dug uh and they didn't find the silver ingots my father saying they're well on their way to australia by now but um and so of course it's donald mickey that we have to know the story about this buried silver ingots and how they were never found ever to this day no so somebody somebody within let's say 50 miles of bletchley is sitting on a fortune oh you definitely heard that one here first but yeah don't don't come dig up bits of the national museum of computing because i'm fairly sure that it's not on the blockchain park site no absolutely not does anyone here have a question for dermot no inspiring questions i've always thought that the thing that the maturing did for code waiting with the bomb whereas the poles had always attacked the introduction bit the setting up stuff and what turing did was to say go for the message which the germans can't change they can't do anything about that message is a message yes so um you're absolutely right so that this is where we shouldn't disparage the inventiveness of alan turing in terms of the enigma problem but the way that the problem had uh evolved by the time it was presented to him was that the polls had solved the problem of how the enigma machine was being set up given the way that the germans were using the machine in 1939 and this depended on them forgive me this is going to be slightly technical and it will take about three minutes but uh we'll we'll we'll we'll do our best to get it done that way so what if if i'm a german enigma operator i need to tell the person who's going to receive my message how to orientate the three coding rotors in their machine so they're set up the same way for decryption as i am using them for encryption so the question is what are the three letters that are uppermost on those three rotors i need to tell the other guy that information i'm not going to broadcast it because there's some rotter some british person is listening into the message so i'm not going to broadcast it in clear i'm going to incite for it so what i'll do is i'll set my enigma rotors to some random three things and then i will in cipher those three letters that i've secretly chosen as the starting point for the real message and then here's where the germans were doing this weird thing up to may 1940 they would in cipher these three letters which are the starting positions of the rotors twice over and it was because they did it twice that it gave the poles an opportunity to figure out what that setting was because they could see patterns forming in the way that the in siphon in ciphered versions of those three letters repeated uh manifested itself and everybody knew including the germans by the way who had been bleating that this was an their own code people have been bleating this was an insecure practice everybody knew that the germans sooner or later would figure out that it wasn't secure and would change it so they'd only inspire it once and then that would blow the polish technique completely out of the water but what the poles had done is they'd shown the way that by mechanizing the process of just testing all 17 500 odd rotor possible rotor positions and doing that electromechanically you could just go for lunch while the machine just cranks through laboriously all the possibilities that that provided the basis for a logic test as to whether you got the right setting or not what alan turing had to do was to invent a new technique which didn't depend on this double incitement of the starting point but was dependent as your question said on the content of the message so you would guess that the germans had put some stock phrase into their uh into their messages and actually the military are terribly good at creating stock phrases i mean the military will typically i mean any french military report you get you get hounded out of the french army if you did not begin your report with i have the honor to report um so that gives you an absolutely perfect thing so you know you know jayla nerd you know you you could just type in honor and it would and the germans were a bit like this too so their reports were very stereotypes and the way that um uh the way that they'd express themselves lent itself to particular words and phrases coming out all the time and so you would say i'll bet you that somewhere in this message there's this particular word or phrase and so you could you could look for it and uh so instead of relying on the three letter settings at the beginning this sort of piece of metadata you'd actually look test for the content but it was the same idea you go through all the 17 000 odd settings and then you test to see whether one of them is logically plausible for the way that the germans are setting their thing up so that's he took this polish idea of mechanically going through everything brute force test coupling it with his new logic test and putting putting the two things two things together thank you i have a question from mick and he has said i've heard rumors that turing made several unauthorized trips to czechoslovakia or other eastern european countries is this true never heard it before i think it's highly unlikely he certainly went to germany before world war ii on i think more than one occasion he went to the united states on several occasions including a secret trip during the middle of world war ii which he wouldn't tell anybody about after the war had finished because the information had been given by the americans was still so highly classified that it would be extremely dangerous to talk about it um so he didn't even talk didn't even mention he'd actually been to the country at all um and but no i'm not aware of any trips to central europe okay um another question that's just come through why was delilah not taken up by the post office yeah that's a difficult question so bear in mind i know we're nearly out of time i'm really sorry about it okay so so i will i will be very quick delilah was a machine invented by alan turing to in cypher phone calls so you think about enigma as in ciphering written messages how can you insight for a phone call got all sorts of problems because you've got to have decipherment in real time whereas written messages you can do it after breakfast delilah was alan turing's answer to this and it was a machine that was about the size of a typewriter a bit bigger and it was ready for production by about d-day and it was never picked up because i think the americans got their speech in cypher machine developed faster even though it was very much bigger i mean we're in a room at the national museum of computing which you use as a classroom and it's about the american machine would have taken up two-thirds of this room so not exactly portable um but i think that is because they got theirs to market first that and because by d-day even if the machine's ready to go into production by d-day that doesn't mean that the machines will actually be ready in time for battle use and everybody expected particularly in the second half of 1944 that actually the war would probably be over by christmas 1944 in europe so i think that they just didn't bother to put it in into production okay thank you so i'm going to say thank you but i am going to do a bit of a very cheeky plug i'm very sorry everyone so i'm not sorry today i was given this so this is uh yep written by this fine gentleman just here reflections of alan turing you have one minute to tell us what this is what it's going to give us um well okay so this is stimulated by the 50 pound note and the idea of alan turing becoming an icon and i thought probably what i should do is look at some of the themes and um ideas that you can be inspired about not just from anna turing's own life and his achievements and some of the mythology that's built up around him but some of the some of the things that are in his background which might uh i mean so for example there's a fascinating story in there about the uh his female cousins who became radiologists in the 1890s and we didn't know i mean there's a marvelous photo in there of my ancestor allen's ancestor called edith stoney teaching physics to women medical students in london in 1913 before world war one that's something that we didn't imagine was possible let alone actually happening so there's some there's some really quite interesting stuff in there and it's all in alan turing's background and then you can take away from that what you think might be an inspiring story uh for you from around that so we can say that if you purchase this book online it will be available at tnmoc it's factually correct apart from the mistakes that i've made but those are not deliberate but but yes so buy buy it for tnmrc because it'd be nice for you guys to get the uh get the reward yes um on behalf of the museum and everyone else i'd like to say thank you very much thank you for having me uh and everybody that's online would like to say thank you uh thanks for joining us if you have any questions that we haven't answered please do email us at the museum and i'm sure that derma and i will catch up and then we can maybe do another blog or another interview where we can answer all of those um questions that you do have and have a lovely weekend you

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Published: Wed Jun 23 2021